Based on an open-source project of the same name, the ownCloudfile sync and share software, deployed on-premise, not only offers
users greater control, but allows organizations to integrate existing security, storage, monitoring and reporting tools, while still taking advantage of the software’s simplicity and flexibility.

File sync and share services like Dropbox, Google Docs, and Box Inc. have revolutionized the way users share information. These cloud-based
services make it easy to share files with clean interfaces and
seemingly endless amounts of storage. However, not everyone wants to
turn over their information to a service provider – for those who prefer to control how and where their data is stored there’s ownCloud.

We’ve completely revamped the design with a much simplified interface so
you can differentiate the navigation elements and focus on what you
want to work with.

OwnCloud comes in a
free, community edition, and the company will launch a commercially
supported enterprise edition of the software in the second quarter. That
version will targeting enterprise IT departments in need of on-premise
file sync and share for sensitive corporate data. The company estimates
it has more than 750,000 users worldwide today.

In the
latest offering, the user interface has been streamlined, so that the
main web navigation panel is now clearly differentiated from in-app
navigations, says Markus Rex,
CEO of ownCloud. And the way in which the software’s settings are laid
out have been revamped, making it easier to distinguish personal
settings from app-specific settings, he says.

“We’ve
completely revamped the design with a much simplified interface so you
can differentiate the navigation elements and focus on what you want to
work with, instead of distracting from that,” says Rex.

New features

This
version of ownCloud also features a Deleted Files app that lets users
restore accidentally deleted files and folders, and improved app
management, so that third-party apps can be easily installed from the
central apps repository and automatically removed from the server, if
disabled. Also included is a new search engine that lets users find
files stored by both name and by content, thanks to the Lucene-based full text search engine app, and a new antivirus feature courtesy of Clam AV scans uploaded files for malware. This release also includes improved contacts, calendar and bookmarks, says Rex.

Performance benefits in this release come from improved file cache and faster syncing of the desktop client, according to company officials. Externally mounted file systems such as Google Drive, Dropbox, FTP
and others can be scanned on-demand and in the background to increase
performance. And hybrid clouds can be created by mixing and matching
storage, thanks to file system abstraction that offers more flexibility
and greater performance.

You can get to the data in all of your data silos from one spot on a
mobile client or desktop client, so you can get to files you might not
be able to access otherwise from those devices.

“You
can get to the data in all of your data silos from one spot on a mobile
client or desktop client, so you can get to files you might not be able
to access otherwise from those devices,” says Rex.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

This guest post comes courtesy of Craig Martin, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Architect at Enterprise Architects, which is a specialist Enterprise Architecture firm operating in the U.S., UK, Asia and Australia.

By Craig Martin, Enterprise Architects

Having delivered many talks on business architecture
over the years, I’m often struck by the common vision driving many
members in the audience – a vision of building cohesion in a business,
achieving the right balance between competing forces and bringing the
business strategy and operations into harmony. However, as with many
ambitious visions, the challenge in this case is immense. As I will
explain, many of the people who envision this future state of nirvana
are, in practice, inadvertently preventing it from happening.

Standards Silos

There
are a host of standards and disciplines that are brought into play by
enterprises to improve business performance and capabilities. For
example standards such as PRINCE2, BABOK, BIZBOK, TOGAF, COBIT, ITIL and PMBOK
are designed to ensure reliability of team output and approach across
various business activities. However, in many instances these standards,
operating together, present important gaps and overlaps. One wonders
whose job it is to integrate and unify these standards. Whose job is it
to understand the business requirements, business processes, drivers,
capabilities and so on?

Apples to Apples?

As
these standards evolve they often introduce new jargon to support their
view of the world. Have you ever had to ask your business to explain
what they do on a single page? The diversity of the views and models can
be quite astonishing:

Each has a purpose and
brings value in isolation. However, in the common scenario where they
are developed using differing tools, methods, frameworks and techniques,
the result is usually greater fragmentation, not more cohesion – and
consequently we can end up with some very confused and exacerbated
business stakeholders who care less about what standard we use and more
about finding clarity to just get the job done.

The Convergence of BusinessArchitecture and Business Analysis

Ask a room filled with business analysts and business architects
how their jobs differ and relate, and I guarantee that would receive a
multitude of alternative and sometimes conflicting perspectives.

Martin

Both of these disciplines try to develop standardized
methods and frameworks for the description of the building blocks of an
organization. They also seek to standardize the means by which to
string them together to create better outcomes.

In other words, they are the disciplines that seek to create balance between two important business goals:

The disciplines of business
architecture and business analysis are both currently seeking to address
this challenge. Martin refers to this as ”design thinking.”

(Click here to see an illustration that further explains these concepts.)

Vision Vs. Reality For Business Analysts and Business Architects

When
examining the competency models for business analysis and business
architecture, the desire is to position these two disciplines right
across the spectrum of reliability and validity.

The
reality is that both the business architect and the business analyst
spend a large portion of their time in the reliability space, and I
believe I’ve found the reason why.

Both the BABOK and
the BIZBOK provide a body of knowledge focused predominantly around the
reliability space. In other words, they look at how we define the
building blocks of an organization, and less so at how we invent better
building blocks within the organization.

Integrating the Disciplines

While
we still have some way to go to integrate, the business architecture
and business analysis disciplines are currently bringing great value to
business through greater reliability and repeatability.
However,
there is a significant opportunity to enable the intuitive thinkers to
look at the bigger picture and identify opportunities to innovate their
business models, their go-to-market, their product and service offerings
and their operations.
Perhaps we might consider introducing a new function to bridge and unify the disciplines?This newly created function might integrate a number of incumbent roles and functions and cover:

A holistic structural view covering the business model and the high-level relationships and

The business architecture and business analysis disciplines are
currently bringing great value to business through greater reliability
and repeatability.

interactions between all business systems

A market model view in which the focus is on understanding the market dynamics, segments and customer need

A products and services model view focusing on customer experience, value proposition, product and service mix and customer value

An operating model view – this is the current focus area of the
business architect and business analyst. You need these building blocks
defined in a reliable, repeatable and manageable structure. This enables
agility within the organization and will support the assembly and
mixing of building blocks to improve customer experience and value

At the end of the day, what matters most is not business
analysis or business architecture themselves, but how the business will
bridge the reliability and validity spectrum to reliably produce desired
business outcomes.

I will discuss this topic in more detail at The Open Group Conference in Sydney, April 15-18, which will be the first Open Group event to be held in Australia.

This
guest post comes courtesy of Craig Martin, Chief Operating
Officer and Chief Architect at Enterprise Architects, which is a
specialist Enterprise Architecture firm operating in the U.S., UK, Asia
and Australia. He is presenting the Business Architecture plenary at the
upcoming Open Group conference in Sydney. Copyright The Open Group and
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.You may also be interested in:

Welcome to the latest edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. Our next discussion examines how Achmea Holding,
one of the largest providers of financial services and insurance in the
Netherlands, has made large strides in running
their IT operations like an efficient business itself.

We'll hear how Achmea rearchitected its IT operations to both be more responsive to users
and more manageable by the business, all based on clear metrics.

Here
to explore these and other enterprise IT performance issues, we're
joined by our co-host for this sponsored podcast, Georg Bock, Director of the Customer Success Group at HP Software, and he's based in Germany.

Gardner: Why is running IT
more like a business important? Why does this make sense now?

Aarnink:
Over the last year, whenever a customer asked us questions, we
delivered what he asked. We came to the conclusion that delivery of
every request that we got was an intensive process for which we created
projects.

It was very difficult to make sure that it
was not a one-time hero effect, but that we could deliver to the
customer what he asked every time, on scope, on specs, on budget, and on
time. We looked at it and said, "Well, it is actually like running a
normal business, and therefore why should we be different? We should be
predictive as well."

Gardner: Georg Bock, is this something you are seeing
more and more of in the field?

Trend in the market

Bock:
Yes, we definitely see this as a trend in the market, specifically with
the customers that are a little more mature in their top-down strategic
thinking. Let’s face it, running IT like a business is an end-to-end
process that requires quite a bit of change across the organization -- not
only technology, but also process and organization. Everyone has to
work hand in hand to be, at the end of the day, predictable and
repeatable in what they're doing, as Richard just explained.

That’s
a huge change for most organizations. However, when it’s being done and
when it has lived in the organization, there's a huge payback. It is
not an easy thing to undertake but it’s inevitable, specifically when we
look at the new trends around cloudmulti-sourcing, mobility, etc.,
which brings new complexity to IT.

You'd better have
your bread and butter business under control before moving into those
areas. That’s why also the timing right now is very important and top of
people’s minds.

Gardner: Tell us a bit
about Achmea, the size of your organization, and why IT is
so fundamentally important to you.

Aarnink: Achmea is a large insurance provider in the
Netherlands. We have around eight million customers in the Netherlands
with 17,000 employees. We're a very old and cooperative organization,
and we have had lots and lots of mergers and acquisitions in the last 20
years. So we had various sets of IT departments from all the other
companies that we centralized over the past years.

If you look at insurance, it's actually having the
trust that whenever something happens to a customer, he can rely on the
insurer to help him out, and usually this means providing money. IT is
necessary to ensure that we can deliver on those promises that we made
to our customers. So it’s a tangible service that we deliver, it’s more
like money, and it’s all about IT.

Of the 17,000
employees that we have in the Netherlands, about 1,800-2,000 employees
work in the centralized IT department. Over the last year, we changed
our target operating model to centralize the technologies in competence
centers, as we call them, in the department that we call Solution Development.
We created a new department, IT
Operations, and we created business-relationship departments that were
merged with the business units that were asking or demanding
functionality from our IT department. We changed our entire operating
model to cope with that, but we still have a lot of homegrown
applications that we have to deliver on a daily basis.

Changing
the department and the organizational structure is one thing, and now
we need to change the content and the applications we deliver.

Gardner: How
has all this allowed you to better manage all the aspects of IT,
and make it align with the business?

Strategy and governance

Aarnink: To answer that question I need to elaborate a little bit on the strategy and governance department, which is actually within the IT department. What we centralized there were project portfolio and project steering, and also the architectural capabilities.

We
make sure that whatever solution we deliver is architectured from a
single model that we manage centrally. That's a real benefit that we
gained in centralizing this and making sure that we can -- from both the
architecture and project perspectives -- govern the projects that we're
going to deliver to our business units.

Bock: Achmea is a
leader in that, and the structure that Richard described is inevitable
to be successful. ERP for IT, or running IT as a business, the
fundamental IT processes, is all about standardization, repeatability,
and predictability, especially in situations where you have mergers and
acquisitions. It’s always a disruption if you have to bring different IT
departments together. If you have a standard that’s easy to replicate,
that’s a no-brainer and winner from a business bottom-line perspective.

In
order to achieve that, you have to have a team that has a horizontal
unit and that can drive the standardization of the company. Richard and
Achmea are not alone in that. Richard and I have quite a number of
discussions with other companies from other industries, and we very much
see that everyone has the same problem, and given those horizontal
teams, primary enterprise architecture, chief technology officer (CTO)
office, or whatever you like to call those departments, is definitely a
trend in the industry and for those mature customers that want to take
that perspective and drive it forward that way.

It’s not rocket science from an intellectual perspective, but we have to cut through the political difficulties.

But
as I said, it’s all about standardization. It’s not rocket science from
an intellectual perspective, but we have to cut through the political
difficulties of driving the adoptions across the different organizations
in the company.

Gardner: What sort of problems or issues did you need to resolve as you worked to change
things for the better?

Aarnink: We looked at the
entire scope of implementing ERP for IT and first we looked at the IT
projects and the portfolio. We looked at that and found out that we
still had several departments running their own solutions in managing IT projects and also budgets. In the past, we had a mechanism of only
controlling the budget for the different business units, but no
centralized view on the IT portfolio, as a whole, for Achmea.

We
started in that area, looking at one system of record for IT projects
and portfolio management, so we could steer what we wanted to develop
and what we wanted to sunset.

Next, we looked at
application portfolio management and tried to look at the set of
applications that we want to currently use and want to use in the future
and the set of applications that we want to sunset in the next year and
how that related to the IT project. So that was one big step that we
made in the last two years. There's still a lot of work to be done in
that area, but it was a big topic.

Service management

The second big topic was looking at service management. Due to all the mergers, we still had lots of variations on IT process. Incident management was covered in a whole different way, when you looked at several departments from the past.

We adopted service desks to cater to all those kind of deviations from the standard ITIL
process. We looked at that and said that we had to centralize again and
we had to make sure that we become more prescriptive in how these
process will look and how we make sure that it's standardized.

That
was the second area that we looked at. The third area was more on the
application quality. How could we make sure that we got a better
first-time-right score in delivering IT projects? How could we make sure
that there is one system of record for requirements and one system of
record for test results and defects. That’s three areas that we invested
in in the first phase.

Lots of change going on

Gardner: What have you have seen in the market that leads you to believe that
ERP for IT is not a vision, but is, in fact, happening, and that we're
starting to see tangible benefits?

Bock: Richard very much nicely described real,
practical results, rather than coming up with a dogmatic, philosophical
process in the first place. I think it’s all about practical results and
practical results need to be predictable and repeatable, otherwise it’s
always the one-time hero effort that Richard brought up in the
beginning, and that’s not scalable at all.

At some point you need process, but you shouldn’t try that dogmatically. I also hear about the Agile versus the waterfall,
whatever is applicable to the problem is the right thing to do. Does
that rule out process? No, not at all. You have to live the process in a
little different way.

Technology always came first and now we look for the nail that you can use that hammer for. That’s not the right thing to do.

Everyone
has to get-away from their dogmatic position and look at it in a little
more relaxed way. We shouldn’t take our thoughts too seriously, but
when we drive ERP for IT to apply some standard ways of doing things, we
just make our life easier. It has nothing to do with esoteric vision,
but it's something that is very achievable. It’s about getting a couple
of people to agree on practical ways of getting it done.

Then,
we can draw the technological consequences from it, rather than the
other way around. That's been the problem in IT from my perspective for
years. Technology always came first and now we look for the nail that
you can use that hammer for. That’s not the right thing to do.

From my perspective,
standardization is simply a necessary conclusion from some of the
trial-and-error mistakes that have been made over the last 10-15 years,
where people tried to customize the hell out of everything just to be in
line with the specificity of how things are being done in their
particular company. But nobody asked why it was that way.

Aarnink: I completely
agree. We had several discussions about how the incident process is
being carried out, and it’s the same in every other company as well. Of
course there are slight differences, but the fact is that an incident
needs to be so resolved, and that’s the same within every company.

Best practice

You
can easily create a best practice for that, adopt it within your own
company, and unburden yourself from thinking about how you should go for
this process, reinvent it, creating your own tool sets, interfaces with
external companies. That can all be centralized, it can all be
standardized.

It’s not our business to create our own
IT tools. It’s the business of delivering policy management systems for
our core industry, which is insurance. We don’t want all the IT that we
need in order to just to keep the IT running. We want that standardized,
so we can concentrate on delivering business value.

Gardner:
Now that we've been calling this ERP for IT, I think it’s important to
look back on where ERP as a concept came from and the fact that getting
more data, more insight, repeatability, analyzing processes, determining
best processes and methods and then instantiating them, is at the core
of ERP. But when we try to do that with IT, how do we measure, what is
the data, and what do we analyze?

Richard, at Achmea, are you looking at key performance indicators (KPIs)
and are using project portfolio management maturity models? How is it
that you're measuring this so that you can, in fact, do what ERP does
best, make it repeatable, make it standardized?

The IT project is a vehicle helping you deliver the value that you need,
and the processes underneath that actually do the work for you.

Aarnink:
If you look from the budget perspective, we look at the budgets, the
timeframes, and the scope of what we need to deliver and whether we
deliver on time, on budget, and on specs, as I already said. So those
are basically the KPIs that we're looking for when we deliver projects.

But
also, if you look at the processes involved when you deliver a project,
then you talk about requirements management. How quickly can you create
a set of requirements and what is the reuse of requirements from the
past. Those are the KPIs we're looking for in the specific processes
when you deliver an IT project.

So the IT project is a
vehicle helping you deliver the value that you need, and the processes
underneath that actually do the work for you. At that level we try to
standardize and we try to make KPIs in order to make sure that we use as
much as possible, that we deliver quality, and we have the resources in
place that we actually need to deliver those functionalities.

You need to look at small steps that can be
taken in a couple of months’ time. So draw up a roadmap and enable
yourself to deliver value every, let’s say 100 days. Make sure that
every time you deliver functionality that’s actually used, and you can
look at your roadmap and adjust it, so you enable yourself to be agile
in that way as well.

The biggest thing that you need to do is take small steps. The other thing is to look at your maturity. We did a CMMi test review. We didn't do the entire CMMi accreditation, but only looked at the areas that we needed to invest in.

Getting advice

We
looked at where we had standardized already and the areas that we
needed to look at first. That can help you prioritize. Then, of course,
look at companies in your network that actually did some steps in this
and make sure that you get advice from them as well.

Bock: I absolutely agree with what
Richard said. If we're looking for some recipe for successes, you have
to have a good balance of strategic goals and tactical steps towards
that strategic goal. Those tactical step need to have a clear measure
and a clear success criteria associated with them. Then you're on a good
track.

I just want to come back to the notion of ERP
for IT that you alluded to earlier, because that term can actually hurt
the discussion quite a bit. If you think about ERP 20 years ago, it was a
big animal. And we shouldn’t look at IT nowadays in the same manner as
ERP was looked at 20 years ago. We don’t want to reinvent a big animal
right now, but we have to have a strategic goal where we look at IT from
an end-to-end perspective, and that’s the analogy that we want to draw.

If we're looking for some recipe for successes, you have to have a good
balance of strategic goals and tactical steps towards that strategic
goal.

ERP is something that has always been
looked as an end-to-end process, and having a clear, common context
associated from an end-to-end perspective, which is not the case in IT
today. We should learn from those analogies that we shouldn’t try to
implement ERP literally for IT, because that would take the whole thing
in one step, where as Richard just said very nicely, you have to take it
in digestible pieces, because we have to deal with a lot of technology
there. You can't take that in one shot.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Avaya today announced a set of Collaborative Cloud offerings designed to make it easier for more types of organizations to deploy unified communications (UC), contact center (CC) and video conferencing -- all as on-demand services.

The adoption of UC and CC as a service (UCaaS and CCaaS) brings utility-based pricing to cloud-service providers (CSPs) so they can offer varied and flexible packages to many types of clients. This creates new revenue streams for CSPs by allowing them to deliver app integrations, mobile collaboration and multichannel customer service for their customers. And it allows buyers to only pay for the IP-based communications services they want and need.

This makes the burgeoning bring you own device (BYOD) trend easier for enterprises to manage because they can off-load more of the complexities of mobile and BYOD environments to their cloud and service providers, said Bruce MacVarish, Director of Cloud Solutions at Avaya. The offerings enable CSPs to evolve and augment enterprise communications with cloud-based solutions, as well as provide greater interoperability across vendors, domains and protocols, he said.

Think of it as video conferencing as a service on demand, integratable
into more mobile devices and therefore business processes.

Santa Clara-based Avaya is carving out four delivery and distribution models for UCaaS and CCaaS: private cloud/on-premises stacks, managed services for service providers, hosted multi-tenancy services for channel players, and a full software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud capability powered by Avaya focused on the mid-market and smaller organization users.

The video services are more geared toward synchronous video interactions, and not hosted, asynchronous video serving, although Avaya offers both. Think of it as video conferencing as a service on demand, integratable into more mobile devices and therefore business processes.

Avaya's move, like with many evolving cloud models, forms a transition from CapEx to OpEx, utility-based pricing and consumption. It also offers ease and speed in adoption, and a single point of integration for value-added SPs and developers.

I expect to see more SaaS business apps providers and cloud-savvy enterprises integrate Avaya's and other UC services into their web, mobile and cloud offerings. These would include such benefits as click-to-call, customer support interception points, and embedded video conferencing brought directly into more business apps, services and processes.

Hybrid deployments

It will be curious to see how the hybrid deployments of UCaaS and CCaaS are assimilated into other business cloud services as the market matures. Will enterprises and SPs alike seek to embed more UC functions, while themselves controlling the UC stack? Or will communications, like many other business services, be something they expect in any cloud stack? Or what combo of hosting will they prefer in which apps?

A lot of the noise around hybrid cloud fails to take the communications feature and their integration into account. Same for big data: Shouldn't all the unstructured data in communications by part of any analytics mix? How to manage that?

Avaya is now in a controlled release of the solutions, and expects general availability in three to six months, said MacVarish.

Avaya Communications Outsourcing Solutions (COS) Express, a private cloud offering for up to 500-seat contact centers, can be hosted by Avaya, a CSP or channel partners -- either as Avaya or co-branded services.

Avaya Collaborative Cloud solutions also include Avaya Collaboration Pods, a portfolio of cloud-ready, turnkey solutions designed to simplify installation and operations of real-time applications; and the AvayaLive suite of public-cloud based communications and collaboration services.